Wegman Report

"The Wegman Report, commissioned by Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX) and Rep. Ed Whitfield (R-KY), is central to the infamous Hockey Stick Controversy and was promoted as “independent, impartial, expert” work by a team of “eminent statisticians.” It was none of those.

As detailed in John Mashey on Strange Scholarship in the Wegman Report, the Wegman report was “a facade for a PR campaign well-honed by Washington, DC ‘think tanks’ and allies, underway for years.”

Passages in the background section on paleoclimatology "had been apparently lifted nearly verbatim from Bradley’s Paleoclimatology: Reconstructing Climates of the Quaternary, and then edited in a manner that introduced distortions and errors."

The "Wegman Report’s social networks background section...is based on unattributed material from Wikipedia and two widely used text books."

Investigation
On October 8, 2010, USA Today revealed that George Mason University was investigating Wegman Report author and GMU statistics professor Edward Wegman. "The investigation followed a formal complaint by paleoclimatologist Raymond Bradley, co-author of the seminal (and controversial) 1998 and 1999 “hockey stick” temperature reconstructions. But a letter from Roger Stough, GMU’s vice-president responsible for research, indicates that the pace of the initial inquiry has been slow. And it appears that a promised date for resolution of the inquiry phase of the proceeding has been missed."

Foot-dragging and lack of transparency from George Mason University
"More than nine long months after [allegedly plagiarized author Raymond] Bradley’s initial formal complaint [to George Mason University ], it is still not known whether GMU has managed to complete its inquiry, or whether there will be a formal investigation. What is clear, however, is that every step of the way GMU has not respected its own procedures and timelines, leading to unconscionable delay and obfuscation. Even worse, it appears that GMU has flagrantly disregarded its obligations with respect to possible misconduct in federally funded work."

Nature: Delay serves no one
A May 26 2011 editorial in Nature concurred that foot-dragging was particularly undesirable in a case such as this one that had influenced policy, saying: "'Long misconduct investigations do not serve anyone, except perhaps university public-relations departments that might hope everyone will have forgotten about a case by the time it wraps up. But in cases such as Wegman's, in which the work in question has been cited in policy debates, there is good reason for haste. Policy informed by rotten research is likely to have its own soft spots. ...'"

Journal article retraction - plagiarism
In May 2011 "a statistics journal [Computational Statistics and Data Analysis ] decided to pull a little-cited 2008 paper on the social networks of author–co-author relationships after it emerged that sections were plagiarized from textbooks and Wikipedia. ... Two of the paper's authors, Yasmin Said and Edward Wegman, both of George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, are also authors of an infamous 2006 report to Congress..."

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